Indefatigable Julien Green, born in 1900,
published in the summer of 1985 his Frere Francois, the long-awaited historical novel on
which he had been working, on and off, for several years. The possibility of continuing to
practice ones art in spite of advancing age is not, for the well versed in French
literature, a new phenomenon. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his seventies, dictated when he could
no longer see well enough to write; Simone de Beauvoir, in her late seventies, wrote even
when hospitalized and continued to publish assiduously; Samuel Beckett, now eighty years
old, has had at least one title in print in the last few years; Eugene Ionesco, also a
septuagenarian, writes, directs and even acts on several of the world's stages. The
examples could be easily multiplied. They prove, if not that senescence is merely a state
of mind, at least that some can cope with it in such a way that mental activities remain
impressively unimpaired.

Julien Green has always been a hard worker:
from his younger days when he had to bear the burden of various psychological ills, to the
present period of physical deterioration which parallels the long-standing existential
anguish of the Catholic Atlas. For it would be difficult indeed to show that, following
his return to Catholicism in 1940, the novelist has been beset any less by his obsession
with the supernatural forces of evil and death, by his guilty desires and by his fears of
his guilty desires, by his tragic view of the human condition, and by that ubiquitous and
devouring worm called remorse, the prime mover of any thinking being. Whether it be in the
very early Adrienne Mesurat (1927), in the postconversion Moira (1950), or in the
1985 story of Saint Francis of Assisi, Green's characters remain somewhat pathological and
somewhat abnormal. They are visionaries or dreamers full of frustration, lonely and tragic
souls incapable of communion with others and barely able to communicate with themselves.
All this is -- - --I --,Mmwnw to say, of course, that they reflect the metaphysical
anxieties of the author, whose characteristics they share, rendering his novels, always,
autobiographical in nature.

Writing on the life of a saint is a dangerous
enterprise, for it is ever so easy to confuse God with the monuments on Via Dolorosa or to
dissolve the supernatural into the daily vogues limiting historians. In addition, for
seven centuries so many literary sculptors have worked the marble of Saint Francis of
Assisi, have reshaped and in some cases shaped the physical and spiritual makeups of the
"Proverells," that adding to the existing library might seem presumptuous, even
superfluous. On the contrary, Green did not wish to explore again those aspects in the
Saint's life belabored by others in the past. The well-known events are passed over
quickly once they are recalled. One gets the impression that many might have been omitted
if the author had not thought it advisable to provide a rounded picture, one in which each
comer, each shadow would complement and explain the other.

But the brush does not, linger on the
obvious. It traces broadly and rapidly those happenings that for Green have less
importance: the childhood years when the boy was called "Francesco" by his
merchant-father in appreciation of the land in which his business prospered, the plunge
into asceticism and mysticism at age twentysix, when he began to devote himself to the
care of the poor, the disadvantaged, the leprous, and above all to prayer; the decision,
in 1209, to give life to his divine call to imitate Christ's existence and to preach by
gathering about him a small group of followers with whom he established a monastic order
called the Friars Minor, later known as the Franciscans; the journey to Rome, a year
later, in order to receive the verbal confirmation of the Order from Innocent 111; the
later perilous pilgrimage to Palestine; finally, his resignation as leader of the Friars
Minor, resignation due to the dissension between the members who were traditional
Observants and desired strict adherence to the vow of poverty, and the modem Conventuals,
who thought that they could and should own the buildings they used and the other
necessaries of their existence. summit of Tuscany, is accorded too much attention by
Green. This

Not even the celebrated escalation of La Verna, the Apennine

astonishing event is the one in the course of
which Saint Francis's body is said to have received the stigmata resembling Christ's
wounds after forty days of fasting on Mount Alverno. But, bordering as it does on the
miraculous, it interests the author much less than those acts of the hero which have had a
mixed reaction because they are less revelatory of the saint than of the man who
occasionally behaved in ways other than expected.

A case in point is Saint Francis's preaching
to birds. Green marvels at Giovanni Francesco Bemardone's approach to religion, which is
characterized by its extreme love of nature. He called both animate and inanimate
creations his brothers and sisters, and thus his penchant for airy creatures and his need
to cornmunicate with them shows his loftier makeup, not unlike that of Green
himself. Actually, if birds could read they would delight in Frere Francois. The
text is airy, light. The syntax moves smoothly, the sentences float and are marvelously
devoid of pretentiousness. Verbs abound, adjectives and adverbs are rare, and thus there
is in paragraph after paragraph a poetic quality of flight, the poesis of Saint Francis
himself, and that of Green for whom identification with his hero is at the very core of
the book's conception. In the last chapter of the text Green gives specific details of
that identification. He reminds us how at age sixteen he had lost his mother, and with her
the Anglican religion of his childhood. He continues:

I was then received into the bosom of the
Church. When the teacher in charge of my religious instruction asked me what name I had
chosen for my baptism, I answered without hesitation: Saint Francis of Assisi .... Once
baptised, I felt immediately ready to follow my patron Saint, but life messed up that
happy disposition and distance separated me more and more from him.... the years carried
me far from my ideal.

In his old age that distance shrank, however,
and he was able to gain insight into the deepest fibers of Saint Francis, which is far
more important than mere emulation.

Another case in point is Green's handling of
the encounters between Saint Francis and Saint Claire, events passed over rather lightly
by other biographers, but which managed to inspire many painters, notably those of the
Cimabue School. In this context the author notes with sadness that man has only one heart
with which to love, and that sole organ must be used both for the love of God and of His
creatures: an insufficiency without cure which is at the core of man's spiritual frailty.
After elaborate details concerning the background of child and teenager Claire, Green
dwells upon the chance and premeditated meetings between Giovanni Francesco Bemardone and
his female admirer. He reviews the first chance encounters in the Church of San Rufino
where he was preaching, unaware of the seventeen-year-old who imbibed voluptuously his
words, without being aware of the meaning or perhaps even the existence of the shocking
adverb. He was then twelve years older than she, but that was of no importance because his
words were those she would have uttered if she had dared, and they seemed to emerge both
from his mouth and from her soul. In his presence she was falling in love with Love, as is
proper for a sentimental and idealistic youth. In beautifully lyrical and
psychologically-succinct language Green comments:

If someone had told her that she was in love
with the Preacher, she would have been horrified and she would not have understood what
was meant by that. Yet, once back in her house, his sweetly vibrant and vigorous voice
followed her, preaching penitence, scorn for riches, and mortification of the flesh....
She too was very pious, young Claire. In fact, that is an understatement: she was already
a saint, practicing the mortification he suggested. Examples are available in abundance.
Even as a child she led a quasi-angelic existence. One of her most characteristic traits
was her desire not to be seen by anyone. Under the silky, elegant clothes in which she was
dressed she would wear, next to her skin, another article of clothing made of rough and
cheap Cilician goat hair. In secret, she always found a way of putting aside and then
giving to the poor some of the elaborate dishes served at her table. In secret, too, she
spent hours praying, much as a mature and devoted nun.

Green goes on to explain, though, that
self-effacement and mortification notwithstanding, the basic carnality of the human being
fights back; but it is precisely this combat between flesh and spirit that separates saint
from mere mortal.

This takes the author into a minute
description of the premeditated meetings, marrying brilliantly historical data with sober
authorial imagination. The biographer's own fascination with, and horror of, women are
well known, and therefore he is particularly suited for understanding and sympathizing
with his hero's attitude. After his conversion not only did Saint Francis generally refuse
to find himself in women's company, but he interdicted his fellow monks to speak to them
or to practice any other form of intercourse with those luring creatures, so dangerous and
so bound to lead even the strongest to perdition. Yet, when asked to grant an interview to
Claire, he agreed. She, threatened by her family with an impending marriage for which she
had no penchant, wished to ask the advice of someone close to God and apt to indicate to
her the right course. But why did he agree to the interview?

Green is marvelously evasive on the question,
forcing the reader to walk tremulously on paths barely suggested, mysterious and
intriguing, much as those of the heart of Saint Francis himself who must have hesitated,
yet surely trembled with the vague attraction that the meeting must have held for him.
Avoiding women is prudent, facing them and resisting bewitchment must have appeared to him
to be the braver option. That was a rationalization, of course, for Green goes on to
mention the possibility of the meeting taking place in the woods, and to indicate the
involuntary recollection by posterity of scenes from Romantic novels of the type read
secretly by young pubescent pupils of respectable lineage in respectable convent schools.
There was the probability of love, then, of mystical love at least. And Green's conclusion
is inescapable: the two were tempting the devil in tempting themselves, just as in his own
existence the biographer would often dare Satan in testing his own strength. The devil's
omnipresence, a recurrent theme in Green's life and work, again sparks the interest of the
author even though he toils as an historian, even though data are scarce and paucity of
comment might have benefited verisimilitude more. But Green is not the usual reserved
biographer, the sedate supplier of facts. He transcends the simple historian devoid of
imagination and proceeds to ask pointed and poignant questions: "Francis, in his
thirtieth year, facing this young girl of exquisite beauty, how could he not have fallen
in love?" And immediately, as if to compensate for its absence in his own existence,
he concludes that a miracle must have taken place then:

Their fall would have been an incalculable
catastrophe because it would have touched thousands of souls which would have been led
away from salvation by their conduct. With Francis, we see the problem better because we
are, so to speak, on familiar ground. Grace works visibly on the human in him; he has
desires and experiences passion just as we do, but, facing a neophyte who reveals to him
so candidly the prodigious appeal of divine love, he cannot help hitting against the wall
of the light of grace. As for Claire, she is in love with Christ perhaps also, but without
knowing it, with Francis himself, for she cannot really distinguish between the two. She
is overjoyed to have the occasion to deliver her soul to this God-given man, and it is
very possible that, in the excess of her euphoria, she falls on her knees in front of him
in order to accentuate better her wish to leave the world and its riches and to
dedicate her life to Christ.

The rest is less important, the rest is
history. Francis pretends not to believe her and orders her, so that she might prove her
sincerity, to dress in sackcloth and go begging through the streets of the town. Claire
accepts, Dame Pauvrete acquires the flesh and bones of a young girl, and Francis helps
Claire take her first step on the road to Paradise. Later, during the dark dawn of 18
March 1212, Claire furtively leaves her parents's home for good and takes refuge in the
Saint Mary of the Angels church where Francis is waiting for her. With unprecedented
gestures (because a much lesser prelate is usually in charge of such chores) it is he who
shaves her head, takes custody of her clothes and sees to it that she is clad in
Franciscan garb. Later still, with his help and the help of his monks, she will be able to
resist the onslaught of her father, Arnaud, and of her uncle, Monaldo, who have enlisted a
band of armed mercenaries in their attempt to free her. The description of the flight of
Catherine, Claire's sister, a week later, is still less important, as is the second
victory of Francis over attackers who place family ties above those with God.

What matters, and what makes for the
excellence of this Iong, Orphic passage and the book's overall fascination is Green's
inability to come to terms entirely with the dichotomy between love of human being and
love of God. His statement that a miracle must have occurred to prevent Francis and Claire
from falling into each other's arms notwithstanding, and his countless comments concerning
the purity of their relationship notwithstanding, he insists just enough on the carnality
of the encounters to give readers a gnawing doubt, a lingering suspicion that perhaps more
was involved, perhaps a great deal more. Example: the sentence "the flesh could not
play any role in it [their relationship]" is contradicted at least in part by the
very next sentence: "It [the flesh] was present, however, though hidden in the abyss
of the subconscious, never manifesting itself." But in spite of these last three
words, and in the same paragraph, recalling the story of their love as recounted by nuns
to whom Claire had made an on-again, off-again confession, Green concludes that Claire had
been speaking to them with "the language of desire, because there is no other
language with which to express the excesses of extreme passion."

In addition, the biographer attempts, but
does not quite manage (voluntarily so?) to explain away the shedding of the worldly
clothes and tonsorial episodes. Concerning the first he states: "Francis, like a true
Italian, knew how to lend poetry to the first step toward Paradise taken by that fiancee
of Christ." This, of course, does not give any precise or valid reason for a major
departure from established ecclesiastical procedures used at the time in connection with
the entrance of a woman into religious life. With respect to the second episode, Green's
editorial leaves little doubt as to his own very real suspicions. He writes: "His
elation must have been so strong when he put the scissors to the hair of Dame Pauvrete
herself, his Dame whom he was cutting off from the world. It must have been a spiritual
conquest of her, a physical seizure too, just as prescribed by ecclesiastical
jurisdiction." Further revealing suspicions that perhaps he would have liked not to
nurture, Green quotes Francis's first rule: 'let us be careful of everyone and let us keep
all our members pure, for God says that whosoever looks at a woman and desires her, has
already committed an adultery of the heart." Nor is the well-known question posed by
Saint Francis missing from the biographer's text: "It is God who prevents us from
marrying, but who knows if it is not the devil who has given us nuns?"

Nevertheless Francis is known to have watched
closely over these spiritual daughters, in particular over his beloved Claire. And Green
ends his discussion of the Francis-Claire affair with the littleknown and perhaps
deliberately ignored event when, one day, having come to preach in the Convent of San
Damiano, he failed to do so. Instead, "he began by kneeling and prayed for a long
time, then he had some ashes brought to him and he drew a circle around the spot where he
was standing, put some over his head, and, kneeling again on the tiles, he continued his
prayer, The sisters, astonished, waited in silence. He got up finally, recited a Miserere
and left the church. And that was all there was to his sermon." Is Green suggesting
here a measure of guilt, a publicly displayed and remorseful mea culpa?

Frere Francois, then, is not a banal
Saint's life, as penned by so many well-meaning Catholic writers. It is the biography of a
person attempting to maintain his saintliness and the autobiography of a sinner aspiring
to sainthood, just as it is, of course, a book of reconciliation between Francis and God
and between Green and himself, or rather his other self, the one he had envisioned during
the ceremony of his baptism. The aging author painfully looks back, and the multifarious
detours loom still enticing, still menacing, but there is a synthesis now: flesh and
spirit, Eros and Agape, cohabit in peace and in tolerance of each other, fused by the
passing years and by the taste of ashes.